Splitting a landscape spread into 2 portrait pages?

For the benefit of later readers.

This is much less hassle than some of the solutions here (including the one marked as "correct answer"). I have a PC--I don't know if this works on Mac, but I'm sure you'll find out quickly. I'm writing the instructions with the assumption whoever is doing this is familiar with the basic tools for editing PDFs using Acrobat.

1. In the organise pages tool, select all pages and extract them as separate files. Save them to a folder--they'll be numbered in order.

3. Open the folder, select all files you just created, then copy and paste them into the same folder (ctrl+a ctrl+c ctrl+v) You'll end up with a list of files something like this:

book 1 - Copy.pdf

book 1.pdf

book 2 - Copy.pdf

book 2.pdf

book 3 - Copy.pdf

etc.

4. Use Acrobat to combine all these files into a single PDF. You'll now have a PDF with every page duplicated, but the duplicate page comes immediately after the original page.

5. Crop all odd pages to the left-hand page and all even pages to the right-hand page.

6. Save--you're done.

If you are using CC and have indesign I split them there, as no manual cropping is necessary.

1. Create a spread in Indesign 

2. Under your pages pallet select the option (hamburger) drop down and allow shuffle pages.

You can then drag the second page in your spread next to the first. By default a spread starts as a single page for the cover and last page.

3. Then click file>Place and tick show import option so you can select individual pages in your pdf.

4. Select first page and place. I generally then duplicate and place second page and so on. Each placed image should be the size of the spread.

5 Export as PDF single pages.

6. You will most likely have your back page as your first page so when finished just swap the pages into correct order in Acrobat or your pdf viewer.

This is an *incredibly* convoluted procedure to do somehting that should be a simple, built-in feature!

There's a great method, very well described here: adobe acrobat - How can I split in half a double-page scanned PDF in a single pass? - Super User  where you can split pages in two. Hopefully this can help :-)

I was looking for an easy answer for this myself, and didn't like the options given here. 

So I made my own:

1. Create a duplicate file

2. In original file, open "Organize Pages"

3. Click "Insert," select "from file"

4. Select the duplicate file, insert "after"

5. Place the pages into their correct orders, such that you have two in a row for each page (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3,...)

6. Go to "Edit"

7. Select "Crop"

8. On first page, select the left hand side of the image, double click on selection

9. Set page range to "All," and "apply to" to "odd pages"

10. Go to second page, which shouldn't be cropped, select the right hand side of the page, double click

11.  Set page range to "All," and "apply to" to "even pages"

Step 5 is potentially time consuming if you have a many paged pdf, but otherwise this is pretty easy,

You might see if the script mentioned in the blog post Splitting PDF Pages by Karl Heinz Kremer can help you.

Workaround (time consuming but it works):

1) extract the page(s) to split.  This creates a copy in a different window.

2) crop the copy to be one part of your split page

3) crop the original to be the other part of your split

4) drag the thumbnail from the extract back to the original windows

Try using Crop function and see if this suits your requirement.

Tools Pane - pages - Crop

Or you can export the PDF to Word doc, and make changes in the word file.

File - Save as - Microsoft Word - Word document